1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the field of telecommunications and, more particularly, to an architecture for providing voice services in or to a telecommunications network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telecommunication companies continually create new telephony services and/or features (hereafter “voice services”) to be offered to subscribers. Voice services are a blend of voice processing technology, call control, and enterprise applications. Voice processing technology is used to recognize both spoken inputs and touch tone inputs from users over a telecommunication link. These inputs direct how a user call is to be handled by the voice service. The inputs also can determine whether a call will be and subsequently is provided to one or more enterprise applications.
Voice servers implement interactive voice response technology with telephony call control. A voice server can execute voice services which can interact with a caller and also redirect calls responsive to user inputs. Accordingly, many businesses rely upon these solutions to direct incoming calls to various locations within an office. Similar to conventional voice response unit (VRU) type systems, more sophisticated voice server solutions can incorporate enterprise data. For example, an inbound call to an employee can be redirected automatically to a telephone number listed in the electronic calendar of the employee.
Although voice servers mark a significant improvement over VRU technology, still, conventional voice servers do have disadvantages. Conventional voice servers utilize an architecture wherein high bandwidth data such as speech is routed throughout the voice server, including to voice and telephony services, thereby requiring the voice server to handle a significant amount of bandwidth throughout the internal communication channels of the voice server. For example, conventional voice servers utilize an architecture which includes a core processor that interacts with a core client. The core client serves as an interface to one or more telephony services. Within such voice server architectures, high bandwidth data typically is routed between the core client and the core processor. The significant amount of bandwidth necessary to route speech data throughout the voice server can place a heavy load on the voice server.
Another disadvantage of conventional voice servers is that such systems are commonly viewed as a single entity comprised of both the voice processing hardware and software components. In consequence, conventional voice servers locate both telephony services and call control including signal routing within the same software component. As a voice processing system expands beyond a single voice server, each added voice server implements and supports its own individual and single call model, resulting in multiple call models. An expanded system architecture of multiple voice servers, however, can become less reliable as the system is unlikely to function as expected, that is as a single, unified entity.
Another disadvantage of conventional voice server architectures, is that the core processor includes the call model. This configuration can reduce operational efficiency as well as complicate expandability of the voice server. More particularly, when multiple core clients are introduced into the voice server, complex call model and communication facilities must be included in the voice server architecture to coordinate and manage the core clients and other components of the voice server.